‘Can You Hug Your Child Today?’: Understanding the American Men's and Fathers’ Rights Movements as Emotional Constituencies, 1960–1995

Abstract

The American men's rights movement cohered in the early 1960s to reclaim men's allegedly lost legal rights and social privileges. Activists focused on men's perceived exploitation in the family courts, protesting alimony payments in particular. By the 1980s, a sub-movement focused on ‘fathers rights’ had emerged. Fathers' rights activists emphasized the issues of child custody placements and child support payments, arguing that mothers received preferential treatment.

These intertwined movements advancing a narrative of anti-male discrimination benefitted from strategic deployments of emotion. Leveraging narratives of anger, sadness, and deprivation allowed these movements to gain new members as well as sympathetic press coverage, while masking the financial motivations underlying some of their desired reforms. The closely related men's and fathers' rights movements thus comprised an emotional constituency, a group united by a shared emotional experience that orients itself toward political and legal systems. In their late-twentieth-century organizing efforts, the emotional constituency of men's and fathers' rights activism pushed for legal and policy changes alongside cultural reevaluations of modern men.